Writer's voices: listen to rare recordings from the British Library"JRR Tolkien, interviewed in the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, has an amiably wheezy, pipe-smoking laugh, and is not nearly so much the old curmudgeon you might imagine. He talks like a rambling but enthusiastic old don, in overlapping half-sentences, stopping to add incoherent footnotes to his observations and going off at unexpected tangents with such breakneck speed, they threaten to give you aural whiplash. The underlying melancholy of the man, and his profound nostalgia and dislike of the modern world are evident, too; for instance, when he casually observes that the world of his boyhood, rural Warwickshire in the 1890s, was far closer to the England of Shakespeare than to the England of 'today', 1965. A remarkable thought, but probably true. "http://entertainment.timesonline.co.u ... _books/article5040417.ece